this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Why do people assume gold has intrinsic value? I just saw today they were freaking out about how much gold is fluctuating, it is just as imaginary as the dollar.
Technically the Big Mac does provide some form of intrinsic value in the form of food for the homless. but for the average person it would actually give them more value to take the big mac away so it has sorta a negative value, negative intrinsic value, I think I just invented that.
This comment actually made me think and look it up. I never thought about this. Why is gold valuable?
Yeah you were basically right. Because societies decided it would be. I mean gold has some practical applications but nothing that would justify it's price.
First link I found says this:
Gold's value is ultimately a social c- onstruction; its worth is sustained by ourcollective agreement about its importance and our belief in its future value.
Gold's physical properties—its lustrous quality, relative scarcity, durability, and difficulty of extraction—reinforce and justify its perceived value.
Unlike other precious metals, gold strikes a balance of being rare enough to be precious but abundant enough to serve as a practical medium of exchange.
So I guess rare enough yet abundand enough and durable enough.
Wild tbh
Planet money had great episode on this topic if you're interested https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1197959089/-price-of-gold-periodic-table-elements
But without gold how will we ever make high quality HDMI cables?
That's a bit light on the "balance" many metals are precious and fairly rare, their physical characteristics like being poisonous, being visually indistinguishable from various cheap metals or malleable to the degree they will wear out as a coin are some issues.
Now look up conspiracy theorists who are obsessed with gold standard and its abandonment.
Btw, we just transmuted our first gold just recently.
Yeah but was the process cheaper than buying it? Converting a million dollars of lanthenides and energy into a few thousand dollars of gold isn't a great trade off
Well, no. And I think it was just not a few atoms. But we did it.
The word "fluctuating" implies the price of gold has been going up and down. That is not what has happened since the Commander-In-Thief took office.
Market price of one ounce of gold over the last five years:
That's a zoom out of 5 years Gold prices don’t move in a straight line. On a day‑to‑day and week‑to‑week basis, there are ups and downs - it zigzags it is absolutely fluctuating but the bigger problem is the sharp incline which suggests it is in a bubble.
And none of any of that has anything to do with anything I said.
Even so, in a scenario where all the currencies fall apart, Gold and Silver are very probable to become the basis of wealth.
Nowadays, stuff like SiIicon and Copper are pretty high value (and similarly, Germanium), but they really depend a lot upon hard to measure purity which goes with high-technology.
So Gold and Silver, which are easier to determine with lower technology (unless someone uses high-technology to spoof them) and also easier to make into useful products, will tend to hold intrinsic value.
Value of iron and others, break down due to abundance, while steel depends upon technology and expertise.
Also because gold and silver are what people will mentally default to. Even if you develop a quick, easy, and free test to determine the purity of cobalt or neodymium and demonstrate how they're more functionally valuable, people will still default to trading au and ag to buy the amount of those metals they need. Copper would be next.
So why gold? Because everyone knows that enough people will trade for it, in the same way you know your landlord, grocer, and bar will all take your country's currency, and that's why you accept it in exchange for your labor
Yeah, and that's why crypto is not catching up well.
Kind of a chicken and egg thing.
But in case of Gold and Silver, there had to be some initial driving factor for when it was first popularised (before people just started mentally defaulting to it).
Even though archaeology suggests that there were some civilisations did use notational currency in times before the relatively modern, well known history, enough of them did go with Gold. And since this was during the time when long distance trade was way slower, I won't consider the case of some single power influencing everyone else without any other driving force behind Gold itself.
Gold and silver caught on because they are rare for surface deposits making them rare, non reactive making them good for coins. Soft and easy to work with, again good for coins. But durable enough and most importantly heavy enough but not too heavy to be not easily lost. Again making them good for coins.
It literally just comes down to they were useful to make coins.
Look to South America where they would "waste" oodles of gold on religious rituals.
Practicality is first, foremost and the only reason something catches on and then STAYS popular.
Over time that practical reason can fall away and stop mattering but to get started you need practicality
Yep, you got it.
Gold and silver originally became commonplace as money, as currency, because they are excellent material to make coins out of.
You can carry bits or coins of gold and silver on your person, and you can denominate them fairly easily, you can store them and they won't corrode, and its not that hard to weigh them or melt them down.
Compare that to trying to haul around a backpack or trailer full of bigmacs.
Yeah, they're pumped full of preservatives, but they won't last anywhere near as long as a non reactive metal.
Nowadays... well, gold and silver are massively important components in computer technology.
So they've got the historical basis as money, and the commodity basis of having a significant amount of vital industy dependant on them.
Bitcoin people used to argue that bitcoin would be a superior currency to all other currencies for a myriad of reasons... but you will always need some kind of computer thing that is either made out of or at some stage of industrial production involves gold/silver/other metals to even be able to transact with bitcoin.
In a modern, capitalist, international fiat currency context, you also can't escape some kind of supply/demand based on use case dynamic for currencies.
Oh, your economy is imploding due to a debt/bond/stock/trade balance crisis?
Less ongoing demand for holding your wealth in that economy's currency, even if it is in bonds that pay interest or stocks that are nominally appreciating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
We are currently basically reverting to a pre Breton Woods international monetary system as the USD implodes, central banks everywhere are hoarding and repatriating gold as the de facto international exchange mechanism, as geopolitical monetary turmoil rises.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1437/sp500-to-gold-ratio-chart
So basically, if at the beginning of 2024, you had $100k in the SP500, you would have ~$146k right now.
If you had $100k of gold at the beginning of 2024... you would have ~$275k right now.
Thats 1.46x vs 2.75x.
That's gold outperforming the SP500 by 88%, in just over two years.
That is a dying economy and currency.
Gold went from about $2000/oz in early 2024 to about $5500/oz at time of me writing this.
I think it was like a week ago that Goldman Sachs or somebody said gold might hit $5400 by the end of the year.
https://www.kitco.com/news/article/2026-01-22/goldman-sachs-raises-2026-gold-price-target-5400oz-private-sector-joins
Yep there it is.
So uh, we did a year in a week.
I think the fact that they're pretty, nonreactive, rare, and were available very early is huge here. Gold is just there sometimes, little flakes and beads washed to rhe surface. It's one of the only metals you find non metallurgical cultures using. From there it became valuable for jewelry and ritual objects because of its rarity and appearance, and once you have something durable, reworkable, and more desired than possessed it becomes a really easy thing to trade, especially when cross culturally valued.
Gold is nothing but an uncertainty indicator proxy, if gold price goes up, people are unsure in the market and future returns and thus buy gold, if the price is low the market and economy feels stable and people don't buy gold
Question for you:
Is there any gold involved in the process of you typing and posting that comment?
Could there maybe be, I dunno, gold, literally as a direct component in, or vital to the manufacturing process of ... maybe some kind of computer chip or something?
Sure, gold has its actual uses, that's why it's marginally better than bitcoin, but the majority of gold is in jewelry or used as a investment vehicle.